Welcome to the Citrine Programming Language Project.

Citrine is a general-purpose, localised scripting language. It aims to foster readable and maintainable code, while remaining simple and easy to learn by focusing on syntactical and conceptual minimalism:

☞ greeting ≔ ‘Hello country!’.

greeting country: ‘Great Britain’.

✎ write: greeting.

Hello Great Britain!

Citrine is wholly free and open-source software, released under the 2-clause BSD License (see the file LICENSE).

For more information (including more examples and an on-line demo), please see the official website.

Citrine is cross-platform and should run on a variety of operating systems, but the installation procedure for some is currently lacking in support. Help to improve the situation is very welcome.

Please make sure you are using the latest official release of Citrine, in order to have the newest features and bug fixes.

The easiest way to get started is by using a precompiled binary, currently available on the official website for the following systems:

• GNU/Linux
• Microsoft Windows
• OpenBSD

Source code for the latest official release may likewise be acquired from the official website. If you choose to compile it yourself, there’s an installation script, mk.sh, included to automate the process. You may run it as follows:

./mk.sh

This should generate a separate binary for every supported language in the bin directory, in a subdirectory matching your system. Now you can install Citrine with all of the compiled binaries using make:

make install

You can adjust the path the files get installed to by setting the variable prefix, if the default value doesn’t work well for your setup:

make prefix='/usr/local' install

Compiling binaries for all the languages can take a while. If you know for sure that you won’t be needing all of those, you can choose to only compile binaries for a subset of the languages instead, by passing their codes as arguments to mk.sh:

./mk.sh en nl  #Compile English and Dutch only.

Without arguments, mk.sh compiles all the languages listed in the i18nsel directory. By default, this is only a symbolic link to the actual directory i18n, where all of the available languages are really stored.

In case mk.sh doesn’t work for you, here’s an explanation of how to compile Citrine manually, but still using make:

First, a binary for every language is compiled separately. Every time you run make on the appropriate makefile, the environment variable ISO of your shell should contain the ISO code of the language you want to compile. Likewise, the variable OS should contain an identifier of your operating system. For example:

ISO='hi' OS='Haiku' make -f makefile all

Given the above, make would fetch Hindi vocabularies from the language’s files in i18n/hi, compile them into a binary named ctr, and copy the binary to the Haiku system’s directory at bin/Haiku, with the language’s code attached to the filename.

Now’s a good opportunity to use the binary to compose a dictionary of translations between two languages. Just point Citrine to each language’s dictionary.h file to make a one-way translation dictionary:

./ctr -g i18n/nl/dictionary.h i18n/hi/dictionary.h > dict/nlhi.dict
./ctr -g i18n/hi/dictionary.h i18n/nl/dictionary.h > dict/hinl.dict

These two commands would produce two dictionaries in the dict directory: one for translating from Dutch to Hindi, and another for translating from Hindi to Dutch.

Having done all this, you can clean up the files produced during compilation and move on to the next language:

make -f makefile clean

Once you’ve compiled all the languages you want, you will find the binaries in bin. You can start using them right away, but you might want to install them under your system’s standard binary path first. You also probably want to install the included font that gives Citrine’s symbols a nicer look in your text editor:

mv bin/Haiku/ctr* ~/.local/bin
mv fonts/Citrine.ttf ~/.local/fonts

And with this, you should be done!

If you’d like to contribute to the project, you can get in touch using e-mail or GitHub. Forms of contribution include, but are not limited to:

• Ideas for improvement.
• Code improvements.
• Translations.
• Plugins.

Citrine and its plugins are written in the C programming language. The Citrine Project is apolitical.